16 research outputs found
Sound propagation and quantum limited damping in a two-dimensional Fermi gas
Strongly interacting two-dimensional Fermi systems are one of the great
remaining challenges in many-body physics due to the interplay of strong local
correlations and enhanced long-range fluctuations. Here, we probe the
thermodynamic and transport properties of a 2D Fermi gas across the BEC-BCS
crossover by studying the propagation and damping of sound modes. We excite
particle currents by imprinting a phase step onto homogeneous Fermi gases
trapped in a box potential and extract the speed of sound from the frequency of
the resulting density oscillations. We measure the speed of sound across the
BEC-BCS crossover and compare the resulting dynamic measurement of the equation
of state both to a static measurement based on recording density profiles and
to Quantum Monte Carlo calculations and find reasonable agreement between all
three. We also measure the damping of the sound mode, which is determined by
the shear and bulk viscosities as well as the thermal conductivity of the gas.
We find that the damping is minimal in the strongly interacting regime and the
diffusivity approaches the universal quantum bound of a perfect
fluid